I love my undead Rogue, Darsino. The first character I got to the then-level cap back in Burning Crusade (I started playing in September of 2006, during Vanilla, but leveling took a long time, and so I think my highest-level character by the time the first expansion came out was only in the 30s - I was also already a big altoholic; see the name of the blog).
Anyway, except for a brief stint focusing on Assassination around I think Warlords of Draenor, he's always been primarily a Subtlety Rogue, a subclass that seems to finally, after like two decades, be having a day in the limelight as one of the top DPS specs (not that it matters much given that I'm almost purely a solo player these days).
I was always drawn, when it comes to the Rogue, to the notion of being an unseen shadow, a blade in the dark striking out and taking down foes without being seen, and the Subtelty specialization really leans into at least the flavor of Stealth.
But here's my issue: after playing a Rogue for around a year in a campaign that eventually fell apart due to a busy DM, I don't love the Rogue as a class in D&D. I think it's got a lot of potential, but I've always wanted it to be more of a martial glass cannon that needs to be evasive and sneaky to survive, but hits like a freight train. We get the former, but it tends to come up short on the latter, instead focusing a bit more on being a skill monkey.
I've always had running concepts of what my World of Warcraft characters might be like in D&D, but with the WoW sourcebook coming out in two months, that potential feels closer to reality. So, how would I do it?
Truthfully, the only character option I'm sure doesn't yet exist but will is going to be the Forsaken playable species. In WoW, the official term for the playable race is just "Undead," which is also a creature type that Undead player characters... are not. Even more than in D&D, every player character in WoW counts as humanoid (with rare exceptions like the Death Knight's Lichborne ability temporarily making them count as undead, among other benefits).
The justification for this, though, is that while the playable Undead are, yes, former humans who died and rose again, they had their souls returned to them. So, they're sentient and sapient, with their normal free will and minds, but in decayed and rotten bodies that look like zombies. Originally raised into undeath as part of the Undead Scourge, this faction that regained their souls came to be known as The Forsaken, and eventually were brought into the Horde by the Tauren, who sympathized with their plight and sought to find some way to cure them and restore them to true life (though given that the living humans distrusted the Forsaken and tried to wipe them out along with the Scourge, it also made sense to align themselves with a faction that could realistically oppose the Alliance).
Anyway, I had some thoughts on how to replicate the actual feel of playing Darsino in WoW, and I came to an interesting conclusion:
He's going to be mostly a Fighter.
In WoW, the Warrior is the rough equivalent to the Fighter (I'd argue that the Fury Warrior is more Barbarian, though interestingly, the book seems to be positioning the Barbarian as the Shaman equivalent, which is funny given that Shamans in WoW all have a fair amount of spellcasting, even if one is still a melee/magic hybrid).
But in D&D, Fighters can take on many forms, and one can be a light (or medium) armored, dexterity-focused character.
Fighters are also the gold standard on actually being good at dealing a lot of damage with weapons (while the Paladin is arguably a stronger class overall, that's more because of their spells and support features, like Aura of Protection).
Now, Subtlety Rogues have a few abilities that allow shadowy clones of them to appear and strike at targets before vanishing. It's actually not unlike the Shadow in Draw Steel, which gets a similar feature at high levels (truly I think its Black Ash subclass for Shadows is about as close to a WoW Sub Rogue as you can get in a TTRPG). While this theme only emerged in the last couple expansions, I think it's one I'm going to lean into, in part because it aligns us with one of the coolest Fighter subclasses in the game: the Echo Knight.
The Echo Knight was from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and as Critical Role gets sort of less entangled with Wizards of the Coast in an official capacity (though they did choose to stick with D&D for campaign 4 rather than going to their in-house game, Daggerheart,) I highly doubt we'll be seeing the Echo Knight reprinted in 5.5.
But that means it's going to still be the super powerful subclass it always has been.
The crux of the Echo Knight is that you can summon an echo of yourself (flavored as an alternate timeline variant of yourself, though this is pretty flexible) nearby with a bonus action, and you can effectively attack from its position or yours, choosing on each attack. The echo is fragile, with only 1 HP, but you can endlessly resummon it. You can also use a bonus action to swap places with it, giving it actually a ton of out-of-combat utility (summon it up on a high ledge and then swap places, for instance).
A number of times equal to your Con modifier, you can make one extra attack as part of the Attack action, but this has to be from your Echo's space.
For gearing, I'd build this around dual-wielding. While the Subtlety Rogue fights exclusively with daggers in WoW, that's not quite as viable in D&D. I think we'd probably instead go with a Shortsword and either a Scimitar or Dagger. The Scimitar does slightly better damage, 1d6 versus 1d4, but the Dagger has the advantage of the thrown property, and if we ever decide to take the Piercer feat, we could make all of our weapons piercing (even if we carry a Shortbow for ranged fighting when we need to).
Fighters get an insane number of weapon masteries, so there's no fear that we'll have any weapon we're using covered. We'll attack with our Shortsword for most of our attacks, and just get our off-hand with the Dagger. Thankfully, Nick makes this part of the attack action, leaving our bonus action open.
Depending on the level we start at, we might eschew stealth and go for bulky medium armor like Scale Mail. Once we cap our Dexterity, though, we will probably want to stick with Studded Leather, as this will give us the highest potential AC and no disadvantage on Stealth checks (we could get higher AC if we got Medium Armor Master, but this no longer removes the stealth disadvantage from Half Plate). If we can get a Breastplate very early, it'll be decent, but by level 4, when we should have a +4 to Dex, Studded Leather will do us fine.
Now, we want to get 6 levels of Fighter before we multiclass into Rogue. We want to get Extra attack at level 5, and then the Fighter's bonus feat at level 6. In fact, I believe that if we put 10 levels into Rogue and 10 into Fighter, we'll eventually have 6 general feats (though getting 11 levels in Fighter for our third attack might be a better investment - oh well, this build is only going to level 10).
Indeed, actually, by the time we hit level 10, if we have Fighter 6 and Rogue 4, that means 3 general feats, which is what a straight Fighter or straight Rogue would get at that level anyway.
Rogue subclass is a less obvious choice. Subtlety Rogues in particular in WoW have a bit of a "shadow magic" theme to them, though only lightly. I was even tempted to go Shadow Monk, but I think the choice here is probably just Arcane Trickster, generally seen as the best Rogue subclass because, well, magic.
Unlike many ATs, though, I don't think I'd grab Booming Blade, because that's really great if we only want to make a single attack. Darsino is going to be making three attacks by this point with each attack action (2x shortsword and 1x dagger). So, spells would primarily be for utility. We'd likely grab Disguise Self and things like Message, Minor Illusion, and maybe Prestidigitation (just because I always like having that). We get Mage Hand automatically.
For other 1st level spells (and we will only have 1st level spells for a long time,) Shield is obviously always good to have, and then perhaps getting Jump could be another way to make us more nimble, jumping across rooftops and such.
Now, feats: we will actually have plenty of feats to choose from.
For our fighting styles, I'm grabbing Two Weapon Fighting. This is one of the best fighting style feats in terms of how much damage you can add to your output each turn.
I actually think I won't be taking Dual Wielder. We're going to have a lot of uses for our bonus action, between our Echo and our Cunning Actions, and I just don't think that we can afford the feat for a somewhat weak attack once per turn. Yes, Rogues really benefit from having tons of opportunities to land Sneak Attack, but we're already getting three per turn.
Instead, I think Mage Slayer is a great gimme option, mostly for the pseudo legendary resistance.
Then, and sure, this feat isn't necessarily the best, but it feels really on-theme, I'm going for Skulker. This gives advantage on Stealth checks to hide mid-combat, gives us blindsight (which Rogues eventually get but we might be able to given our fighter levels) and prevents us from losing the Hidden condition if we miss with a ranged attack.
Finally, we could grab Piercer, which is ok. But again, perhaps less optimal but something I might just like, I kind of want to go Skill Expert. This will grant us one extra skill (making up for the one fewer skill we got for not starting as a Rogue - we do still get one extra skill when we multiclass into it, but Rogues normally get two extra) and one extra expertise.
The full list I grabbed was Acrobatics, Deception, Insight, Investigation, Perception, Sleight of Hand, and Stealth (using the Criminal background reskinned as Spy, which is how I've always conceived of Darsino, as basically one of the top intelligence agents of the Deathstalkers). Expertise is put into Stealth, Perception, and Deception (the latter of which makes up for dumping Charisma).
As mentioned above, the Criminal background grants Alert, which feels like a solid feat choice especially for a character who prefers to get the drop on his foes.
So, by level 10, with 6 levels of fighter and 4 of rogue, he will have his Dexterity capped at 20.
Ok, so here we are:
How much damage do we do versus a Wyvern?
Sadly, this is a build that uses Vex weapons, which vex me when it comes to figuring out the actual chances of having advantage on our attacks.
Our echo is not a creature (it actually doesn't specify that it's an object either, but that's how I'd treat it in game terms) so we won't be able to flank with it (though flanking isn't even mentioned in the 5.5 core rules, and I think it's actually reasonable to disallow it).
But, we're very sneaky. So, I'm going to skew things here a little: let's just assume we have advantage on all of our attacks. That might inflate our damage output a little bit, but I don't know that it's even that unrealistic. And it just makes my life far easier.
Ok, so, we have a +9 to hit with all of our attacks. Each turn we make two Shortsword attacks and one Dagger attack. If we hit on any of them, we will get our Sneak Attack bonus, which is 2d6 at this rogue level. If we go all out, we can use Unleash Incarnation to make one additional attack with our Echo. Our bonus action will be used to summon/position our echo, or use Cunning Action to hide or otherwise survive the fight better.
So, Shortswords with advantage: against an AC of 14, we're talking hitting on a 5 or higher, so that's an 80% chance to hit normally, which becomes a 96% chance to hit with advantage. With advantage we have a 9.75% chance to crit. We deal 1d6+5 damage on a hit, or 8.5, and 3.5 extra on a crit.
Thus, 8.5x96% is 8.16 and 3.5x9.75% is roughly .34, so we're looking at 8.5 average damage per shortsword attack, and thus doubled to 17.
Our dagger does 1d4+5 damage, or 7.5 on a hit, and 2.5 more on a crit, with the same hit and crit chances, so 7.5x96% is 7.2 and 2.5x9.75% is roughly .24, so we're looking at 7.44, bringing our total damage up to 25.44
Now, our sneak attack. With all this assumed advantage, we can probably guess that we'll be getting this if we hit. Our chance to actually land a hit on one of our three attacks is basically one minus 4% (our miss chance) cubed. So, 4% cubed is .0064%, meaning we are more or less guaranteed to get our sneak attack - literally the chance we miss on all three attacks is so low that I'd typically round it off.
However, we might crit. So, I'm going to basically treat the damage here as 100% plus 9.75%. 2d6 is 7 on average, so 7x109.75% is about 7.7.
Thus, the damage becomes 33.14.
We can only use Unleash Incarnation a couple times per long rest (our Con isn't enormous given the background we chose and the desire to put a little more into Intelligence and Wisdom, which are pretty important Spy stats,) so I think we can only really assume we're using this once in this fight, unless we really want to go all out.
This simply adds another Shortsword attack, so we get to toss in an extra 8.5, bringing turn 1 up to 41.14.
It's not amazing damage, to be frank. But I do think we'll be extremely slippery, between Cunning Action and swapping with our Echo. We can even play it really safe and send our Echo out to make all of our attacks if we want, striking against some dangerous foe while we're running for cover, so I think this could be very fun to play.
At higher levels, I think we'd probably want to put at least two more levels into Fighter (grabbing another feat, but also getting our level 7 subclass feature, which gives us some more utility). Then, four more levels into Rogue would boost our Sneak attack, give us another feat, get us 2nd level spells, and also give us Reliable Talent and Evasion, Cunning Strikes, Uncanny Dodge, and more Expertise. By that point we'd be level 16, but if we were pushing into tier 4, I think probably we put our last 4 levels into Fighter, getting a third attack by level 19 and another feat at level 20, plus, like Indomitable and Tactical Master (though our Vex and Nick properties are probably going to be what we want to stick with most of the time) and our level 10 Echo Knight feature, Shadow Martyr.
Alternatively, if we only went to Fighter 8 and did Rogue 12, we'd actually wind up with 7 total General feats, our Sneak Attack would eventually grow to 6d6, and we'd get more Arcane Trickster stuff including Magical Ambush and some more spells. For 2nd level spells, Invisibility feels like a classic one, and I love a good Misty Step (very much like Shadow Step from WoW).
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